Stripped and ready

Holy Trinity Church this afternoon was a strange place to be. Everything that moves had been moved, including the organ console and the speakers that were hidden behind the pipework of a previous instrument. Removing the wiring necessitated ripping up the carpet in the choir, revealing the original flagstones, the wooden centre aisle covering the service duct (sounds like a proper name, no?), and the wooden platform added in the past to extend the raised area forward into the nave.

It is intended to remove this, leaving a series of three steps up into the sanctuary, with one just in line with the rear of the pulpit. It was while we were discussing this that we found the markings on the arch that show that the altar rail used to run from pulpit to sacristy door, and began to see how different the original church had looked from its current appearance.

As we piled organ pipes into the tower room and removed the computer part to a secure storage unit, it felt at once bleak and exciting. This is the stage we all hate when we're having work done in our house; it's much the same in church, on a rather larger scale.